From Typological to Functional Assumptions
The special education delivery system that grew out of the Education of the Handicapped Act (EHA; 1975) embodied a set of assumptions that created special education structures in public schools. These assumptions included the idea that there were students with disabilities in our schools who were entitled to heightened due process, procedural safeguards and protections in assessments. These students were entitled by law to a Free Appropriate Public Education that was reasonably calculated to meet their unique educational needs. Once identified, these students also generated additional educational revenue for their districts and state that is used to defray the excess educational costs of educating these students. The logic also followed that there were other students in our schools who did not have educational disabilities, and as a result were not entitled to special services to meet their educational needs. General education and other supplementary services were presumed to be enough to serve these students' education needs. As a result of these assumptions, most state's implementations of EHA created a two-tiered model of educational service delivery: general education and special education (Will, 1986).
One unfortunate consequences of a two-tiered model of service delivery was the typological organization of resources. Students with disabilities received specially-designed intensive interventions; students without disabilities received core instruction and sometimes programmatically organized supplemental instruction (e.g., Title 1, English as a Second Language Instruction, Talented and Gifted Education). This system is predicated on the idea that student instructional needs exist in discreet categories and that grouping students based on these typological variables will result in maximized results for students. From the standpoint of organizational and administrative efficiency in schools, this organization makes a certain amount of sense. When viewed through the practical lens of student proficiency in basic skills areas, the system has not produced the broad-based student performance results that are called for by the educational accountability movement. Indeed, grouping students based on instructionally questionable variables, prescribing instruction based on these "groupings", then expecting enhanced outcomes has not been documented to be an effective practice. Aptitude-by-treatment interactions at a disability label or programmatic level have not been proven (e.g., Arter & Jenkins, 1979; Cronbach, 1975).
The solution to typologically organized resources is to rethink resource allocation structures from a functional perspective. That is, begin with the idea that the purpose of the system is student achievement, acknowledge that student needs exist on a continuum rather than in typological groupings and organize resources to make educational resources available in direct proportion to student need. At Heartland, this logic caused foundational redefinition of the assumptions undergirding service delivery structures. Major components of the shift are listed in Table 1.
Table 1: Redefinition of Assumptions
| Heartland's Historical System (1975-1990) |
Heartland's Problem Solving System (1990-2003) |
|
| Basis for grouping students for instruction | Group students for instruction based on categories with questionable or very global instructional relevance (learning disabled, slow learners, disadvantaged/Title 1, mild mental retardation etc.) | Group students for instruction based on direct measurement and analysis of student performance - regroup frequently (e.g., group students together who need explicit phonics instruction, group students together who need to be taught to monitor meaning while reading, group students together who need to be pretaught new vocabulary to promote comprehension) |
| Focus of most individual assessment | Assessing students to determine differential diagnosis. Global tests (e.g., IQ tests, nationally-normed achievement tests) are used focused on instructionally distal variables | Nearly all assessments done with individuals are designed to diagnose the "learning enabled" (the conditions under which learning is enabled). |
| Availability of resources to support differentiation of instruction | Based on categorical "qualifying" criteria with questionable or extremely global instructional relevance (students who qualify for Title 1, Students with Mild Mental Retardation, Students who are English Language Learners etc.) | Resources are made available based on direct measurement of student performance and specific instructional needs (e.g., students who have mild deficits in phonemic awareness get direct instruction in phonemic awareness without needing to "qualify" for categorical programming). |
| Organization of available resources | Resources organized typologically with administratively separate entrance criteria, funding streams and rules about resource utilization (e.g., if the student gets program A, they can't get program B) | Resources organized seamlessly, resources brought to bear in direct proportion to the nature, severity and durability of student problem. Students get the amount of resources necessary to occasion and sustain acceptable rates of learning. |
This new logic set has been illustrated graphically as a Cartesian Plane (Figure 1).
Figure 1. Resource allocation logic in Heartland's problem solving model
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